Poll: Which chat platform do you primarily use?

About the author

Jason Hibbets - Jason Hibbets is a senior community evangelist in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat where he is a community manager for Opensource.com. He has been with Red Hat since 2003 and is the author of The foundation for an open source city. Prior roles include senior marketing specialist, project manager, Red Hat Knowledgebase maintainer, and support engineer. Follow him on Twitter: @jhibbets

Which chat platform do you primarily use?

Chat has changed a lot over the years. It plays a vital role in communicating and collaborating. I remember using ICQ—do you remember that annoying sound when someone messaged you? Uh-Oh!

While the underlying technology and protocols haven't seen much change, the tools we use have certainly come and gone. The introduction of micro-blogging has seen chat move out of the chat room to highly-visable on platforms like Gmail and Salesforce. But we're curious...

Which tool is your go-to chat preference? If you could only pick one, even though we know many of you use more than one, which would it be? Tell us what you use and why.

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About the author

Jason Hibbets - Jason Hibbets is a senior community evangelist in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat where he is a community manager for Opensource.com. He has been with Red Hat since 2003 and is the author of The foundation for an open source city. Prior roles include senior marketing specialist, project manager, Red Hat Knowledgebase maintainer, and support engineer. Follow him on Twitter: @jhibbets

19 Comments

Skype, by far my preference for chats. Been using it for almost 10 years now.

It's always been easy to setup group chats, which I use(d) frequently during team meetings in open source projects. Chatting with people from all over the globe. Benefits of Skype have always been that you could switch to voice, share screens and files etc.

I agree, I've used IRC for more that I should have, I use Skype for quite some time now, not ten years yet, and is far more advanced and conformable than Twitter/Facebook, Google Hangouts are getting better, but still not good enough for daily basis use.

--Edit:
I recently started to use ICQ, due it's really popular in Russian and Eastern European countries, it has come a long way from what it was at the beginning.

Skype is by FAR the best chat option for me and my friends. How is there not a good Skype replacement yet? Jitsi is buggy in ways that my "normal" friends find unacceptable, same with its lower quality video. Where are all of the XMPP video chat clients?

I could never get into IRC or ICQ or whatever it was called. It was almost too anonymous. I never knew how to find anyone to chat with through there. I was a number and that was annoying. I use yahoo and even less msn because it was simple and I understood it and there was a chat room so you could find people to chat up and choose who you talked to or didn't and you get to know them by how they interacted with others in the room.

I really like Skype for its ease of use and capabilities. Chat, video, audio, all, some, 1. But isn't OpenId the future in chat? I'm tired of different chat platforms just like I am tired of different logins. Give me one customizable interface that gives me my most important tools to go with my my custom homepage interface.

skype, for me too.
i feel like this poll makes little sense as is. i never heard of chatter before, and skype should definitely be its own item (does it go under IM, or under "Other", cause it is traditionally more voice oriented then IM?).
i would love to have an open alternative for skype, and i know that there were efforts, but even me as a techie never got to install and setup one of them.
skype is nice, cause normal people use it. i see no way for it to be replaced by an open alternative (which i would love to see). even if it were as easy to use and stable and all as skype itsself (which nothing is, so far), why would people switch?

for an open source dev though, IRC is clearly a must. it is just not good for chatting with "normal" people.

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